A Look Back And a Provocative Look Ahead Welcome to an anniversary party— one played out not in a ballroom or country-club drawing room but in pages of cold print. The milestone we are marking is our 10th anniversary of publishing Digital Transactions, an enterprise we rather immodestly think of …

Elizabeth Whalen The online retailing giant has been processing payments for other merchants for years, and has quietly amassed more than 200 million user accounts. Now it’s offering even slicker, faster payment services. Retail giant Amazon.com is no stranger to accepting consumer payments on its own and other Web sites, …

Ammo for ISOs in the Tablet Wars Independent sales organizations are starting to feel squeezed by technology companies selling tablet-based point-of-sale solutions to merchants, according to terminal kingpin VeriFone Systems Inc. So VeriFone last month rolled out a tablet-based platform for its resellers that they can price and market to …

By John Stewart n The good news for merchant processors is that the U.S. acquiring market will turn in a robust performance over the next five years, growing at an average annual rate of 10.5%. The bad news, at least for acquirers that remain wedded to conventional terminals and conventional …

Michael Barrett and Sebastien Taveau Standards are finally emerging that will bring secure biometric authentication to millions of smart phones. Those of us who practice the “dark arts” of information security know all too well that we are often misunderstood by our colleagues. They have been quick to impugn our …

Mobile dominates this year’s Guide, as you’d expect, but so does the urge toward faster payments. Neither trend is going away any time soon. The obvious theme running through alternative payments nowadays is the predominance of mobile. Processors, solutions vendors, and startups alike are scrambling to make it possible to …

George Peabody From financial institutions to card networks to mobile carriers, a fixation on payments has dimmed the once-bright prospects for near-field communication technology. Wences Casares, founder of Bling Nation and Lemon.com, once said of near-field communication, “NFC is a great technology. But it was abducted by payments, and hasn’t …

Linda Punch Hobbled by limited resources and other handicaps, government units are struggling to combat a rising onslaught from online data thieves. When news of a data breach hits the national headlines, it usually involves retailers, processors, and others in the private sector. But government entities from park districts and …

Spot Credit And Mobile Fuel Online Sales There’s been an awful lot of buzz about mobile payments the past few years, and now the payment method is starting to register. Indeed, 2012 marked the first time mobile-originated transactions accounted for a meaningful share of online purchase volume, says Beth Robertson, …

  New data from the automated clearing house network show that ACH debit transactions for online bill payments grew 9% in the third quarter while paper checks converted into ACH transactions after being mailed to lockboxes decreased by 8%. The story behind the interrelated numbers boils down to the years-long …